Trump’s parting gift to America


It’s safe to say that Trump’s presidency effectively ended yesterday, even if he avoids being thrown out of the White House on his ear before Inauguration Day. He leaves in his wake so many disasters that it will take years just to identify them all. But here are two having to do with the pandemic.

First: Yesterday, according to Worldometers.info, the US logged a record for Covid deaths: 4,100. To top it off (since Trump loves superlatives), we also logged a record number of new cases: 260,973. I’m not sure there’s ever been a day when we broke both records. Thanks, Donald!

Second and more importantly: According to the CDC, once again we seem to have missed our chance to mitigate the spread of a deadly new virus, in fact two of them. I’m referring to the two new variants of the coronavirus, one first identified in the UK and the other in South Africa. The CDC believes they’ve both achieved a good foothold in the US, although we can’t know for sure since the US is 42nd in the world in doing sequencing of coronavirus genes.  It seems it’s already too late to take any special measures like finding everybody with these variants and quarantining them – since, of course we would never be able to find them without widespread sequencing.

The new variants don’t seem to be any more deadly than the current one, but the problem is they can spread so much more quickly that many more people will get sick. And given that lots of hospitals in the US (especially in California) are now at more than 100% capacity, this will inevitably lead to more deaths than would have occurred if only the current variant were circulating. Even more seriously, the new faster rate of spread of the virus overall will raise the threshold of infections and vaccinations needed to achieve herd immunity – since that threshold is very dependent on the rate of spread. Meaning that the date at which the virus can finally be considered contained will be delayed.

If we actually had a president who cared about anything other than inciting violence in the Capitol, that person would have jumped on this new development as soon as it was reported (less than two months ago?). They would have ramped up sequencing of the new strand, and strictly quarantined anyone identified with the virus (which of course includes testing people without symptoms using certain controlled methods). Then we might not have had this to add to our worries.

It would actually be good if Trump were removed under the 25th Amendment right away. At least Pence might begin to have some Christian compassion on the American people in this matter, something he has so far not shown at all. But frankly, any responsible adult would be an improvement.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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